In an era of Clintonesque caution, when Democrats typically mute any expression of their leftward leanings, Bill de Blasio, who will almost certainly be elected mayor of New York City two weeks from now, does not concede an inch to the right.
He talks about sharing the wealth. He is pro-tenant and anti-landlord. He wants to tax the rich to help the poor. He stands solidly in support of undocumented immigrants. He sides with workers over employers. He backs the teachers' union in its struggles with the charter school movement. He supports programs to ensure that every New Yorker eligible for food stamps, health care, income security and social services gets on the rolls, effectively resurrecting the welfare rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The de Blasio platform, "One New York, Rising Together," is a remarkable document, a statement of left principles rarely heard of from a major politician in recent decades.
Battling inequality will "be at the very center of our vision for the next four years" de Blasio, who leads his Republican opponent, Joe Lhota, 68-24 in recent polling, says in his platform. There's more:
■ "New York City spends too many dollars in one-off deals for large, well-connected corporations."
■ "Bill de Blasio believes that crime reduction and public safety are not served by aggressively pursuing incarceration of nonviolent offenders — particularly when cases demand rehabilitative and holistic multi-agency responses."
■ "Gentriļ¬cation, unscrupulous landlords, and the real estate lobby's hold on government have pulled tens of thousands of apartments out of rent stabilization, and more are lost every year."
■ "Nearly 400,000 millionaires call New York home, while nearly half of our neighbors live at or near the poverty line."
■ "No family should ever be hungry in our city, and Bill de Blasio will work relentlessly to expand enrollment for eligible households to income and food assistance programs."
Just as important as what's in de Blasio's proposals is what's missing: there is nothing that could be construed as blame-the-victim rhetoric – the time-honored political tactic of accusing poor people of causing their own misery; there are no law-and-order demands; there is, in fact, no hint of the "undeserving poor" at all.
De Blasio casts himself as the defender of those whom Mitt Romney pejoratively characterized as "the 47 percent."
Although de Blasio's policies clearly favor the poor over the affluent, his support was consistently high among all income groups voting in the Democratic primary, according to exit poll data. De Blasio, whose father went to Yale and whose mother went to Smith, received strong support among those with incomes above $100,000 (39 percent) and strong support among those with incomes below $30,000 (37 percent).
In New York, according to an April 2013 report by the city's Center for Economic Opportunity, graphically presented in Figure 1, 45.8 percent of the city's population lives in poverty (an annual income of $30,994 or less for a four-person family) or at "near poverty" (from $30,995 to $46,416 for a family of four).
The report found that steps taken by the Bloomberg administration to enroll all eligible recipients of federal, state and local benefit programs — the kind of efforts de Blasio says he would redouble – significantly reduced poverty levels: "We find that these additional steps blunted what would have been a very sharp rise in the CEO poverty rate from 2008 to 2011.We estimate that without these initiatives, the CEO poverty rate would have increased to 23.6 percent in 2011, instead of 21.3 percent."
DEMOGRAPHICALLY, New York City is already where the nation will be sometime in the latter part of this century. Whites are 33.3 percent of the city's population. Hispanics are close behind, at 28.6 percent, and blacks are at 22.8 percent. This demographic profile, as shown in Figure 2, is significantly different from what it was 1990, a year after the last mayoral victory by a liberal Democrat, David Dinkins. In 1990, whites were the clearly dominant plurality group at 43.2 percent, with roughly equal numbers of blacks, 25.2 percent, and Hispanics, 24.4 percent.
More important in terms of both election outcomes and policy-making, the city's electorate – the people who actually go out and cast ballots – shifted from a 56 percent white majority in 1989 to a 46 percent minority in 2009, during the last mayoral election. If that transition continues at roughly the same rate, about 1 percentage point every two years, the 2013 electorate for the mayoral election will be 44 percent white.
Among the reasons the electorate in New York has a higher percentage of whites and a smaller proportion of minorities than the city's population as a whole is that a higher percentage of whites are of voting age and a higher percentage of minorities are not citizens and are thus ineligible to vote.
Ron Hayduk, a political scientist at City University of New York, estimates that foreign-born non-citizens make up 22 percent of the adult New York City population.
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